Who Crisped My Bacon, Damnit?

I am so tired of getting solicitations from hospitals and colleges asking me to give generously, or how about sending us some extra money because we fixed your flooby valve, or don’t forget us in your will. My will!

The cost of attending either one of these institutions has spiraled unforgivably out of control, and I know just where to place the blame: corporate dumbasses who have gained control of them, and can’t stop spending money like they’ve got one day to live, all under the guise of being “competitive.”

Stop upgrading. I mean it. Stop making the hospital look like the frickin’ Four Seasons. Nobody needs that. That is wasted money, spent by some idiot Chief Executive Officer who is worried about their “brand” and who thinks he needs to “compete” with other hospitals.

There is no need for a hospital to compete. And here’s why: when you act like a DIY chucklehead and breach a major artery with your orbital sander, blood spewing everywhere like a Tarantino movie, the last thing you are going to say to the ambulance driver as you see the light at the end of the tunnel is, “Hey, I think we’ve got time – let’s go to the Ritz Carlton Valley Medical Center because they have such a nice lobby chandelier.”

No. You want the closest one with a doctor who has drugs and sutures.

Those same idiots are running colleges like corporations too. Ridiculous gobs of money are spent building extravagant structures that would make Egyptian Pharaohs tent their skirts; the dormitories have evolved into swanky urban centers that would price you out, you scumbag riff-raff, if they were on the market in any city in America.

All this to educate kids who will eat something off the ground outside for breakfast on a dare, or drink what is left over in someone’s red cup from a party two days earlier.

There is no need for a college to compete. Everyone wants to go. If you make them cheap enough, everyone will. You know why? Because kids actually want to get out of the house and college is a way to do that, and more than anything, they want to be in close proximity to thousands of people of the opposite (and same) sex.

Stop flippin’ competing. Stop it.

Every hospital should look exactly the same – just like the local CVS or Rite Aid. No frills, just a clean spartan environment. Nobody needs a fancy pants waiting room with bullshit Herman Miller couches. They just want to get something taken out, or put in, or fixed.

No college should look like a damned spa. Concrete pillbox dormitories and normal looking lecture halls with no designer distractions will do just fine. Believe me, those kids will take enough hallucinogens to make those walls look like whatever the hell their still-forming brains want to see. Stop wasting the money, and CHARGE ME LESS.

Fix it by getting rid of the CEO-types. Fire them right now. They only exist to increase costs. Hire someone frugal who is willing to say, “Real art on the walls? Are you effing insane?”

Most people can afford to stay at a Holiday Inn Express. Very few can even get past the doorman at a St. Regis.

So true and funny. The college I went to built a very fancy locker room for the their football team in which two players dressed, that is until they got sent upriver for rape. You point out superbly that competition can lead to arms races. And your phrase “DIY chucklehead”? –awesome.

I so agree Forrest! When Lenox Hill Hospital put in the VIP maternity wing so that the likes of Beyonce and whatever her husband’s name is could have their baby in room decked out with Mahogany walls, I knew something was wrong. College dorms and apartments are supposed to be crappy. Why? So, your kid wants to come home and see you once in a while. Loved this post!

Thank you Donna. We love it when our oldest kid escapes her three-people-crammed-into-a-two-person-just-to-save-some-money dorm room and comes home. But oddly, after cleaning up after her for the duration of the break, we are just as happy to see her…continue her education 😉

I have, more than once in the last 3 and a half years, thought about my daughter walking around the hallowed halls of the University of Oregon, going to any and all sports events she can possibly get to (for free), whether that be at Autzen Stadium or Matt Knight Arena, or maybe she wants to look at great art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, also located on campus. If she gets a cold, she goes to the Campus Health Center, where they give her heated blankets to cuddle in while she sits in the waiting room……..well enough about her. We love her. And that’s why we work in the public schools daily, where light switches don’t work, where you have to hold the flusher knob down on the toilets and count to 20 before you let go, where the locks on all the doors are tenuous at best, and several of the bell systems are off by as much as 4 minutes (apparently the guy who fixes bell systems makes an inordinate amount of money, and has to cover the entire Pacific Northwest region, in other words, not available!), and of course, where the internet is so slow and there are so many filters up, that a student can barely get to the sources they need in time to complete their assignment. And since school districts don’t pay for full time nurses anymore, you’re lucky to get a band-aid from the office lady if you get a cut. Ah, but I digress. I need to stay focused and realize that we are working our asses off for our children to be raised in splendor, and for some distant figurehead to revel in cutting edge optics. What else would I be doing at my age?
Now, I would also like some of that crisped bacon, but I’m on a strict low fat diet so it has to be turkey bacon. I can’t have clogged arteries because that might make me miss a day of work.
Thanks for letting me vent Forrest. 😉

And somewhere in between the hallowed halls and your flusher knob lies the solution. Too much of one, not enough of the other. The important thing is the education, and achieving that while still being able to eat bacon.

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